Practice test 1 - Nhung Bui

The common topic of both the reading passage and the lecture is the causes of crime. However, the perspective is totally difference. While the writer thinks that poverty, race, the size and structure of population are main reasons of crime, the professor strongly casts down on these points.

Firstly, according to the passage, poverty is the key reason of crime. On the contrary, there is no obvious evidence to conclude that a poor community has more case of crime. Hundreds of researches prove that in the society, a lot of people have no job, the crime rate do not increase. For instance, in the US, when the economy was wealthy and the unemployment was low, the case of crime increased. Conversely, the crime rate dropped when the recession happened.

Secondly, the passage contends that crime directly relates to race. However, the professor opposes that point. Instead of race or their color, broken families are the main cause of crime. Specifically, there are more broken cases in black families than that in the white ones. As a result, the black people commit crimes more.

Finally, the writer claims that the size and structure of population is another cause of crime. But the lecture shows that the above reason does not link to the crime, the structure of family directly relates to crime. With a lot of evidence, the higher a number of broken family is, the higher the crime rate is. More specifically, children especially teenagers living in a violent environment and lacking love from their parents commit crime or become wrongdoers easily.